|
Beryl Fox’s The Mills of the Gods remains the quintessential example of Canadian documentary filmmaking. Fox takes us into the Vietnam War and allows us to see first hand the futility, sorrow and inhumanity at its core. Her theme of the conflict between people and ideologies is a universal and timeless one, told through haunting sound and visual images. Today, 34 years after it was first telecast, scenes of brutal civilian casualties, torture of POW’s, and gleeful napalm bombing still shock and outrage us. Contrasted with this horror are scenes from the everyday life of the Vietnamese peasantry, working in the fields, shopping in the market, going to school. Fox creates for the viewer a sense of tension and foreboding, ultimately borne out in images of death, destruction and bodybags on the nightly news. The Mills of the Gods transcends the banality of mass media images of war and still retains its extraordinary power and poignancy.
Winner of the 1966 Film of the Year Award at the Canadian Film Awards presentations, the George Polk Memorial Award from Long Island University for outstanding documentary of 1965, and a CBC Wilderness Award.
Holdings:
Full production elements (A&B rolls, negative, optical negative, mastermix, work print, rehearsal print) are held by the CBC and the National Archives of Canada. | 
